Concept Studio
See the idea. Put it to the test.
956 activities from Kindergarten to Year 12, in 13 subject areas. A practical gives the idea, what you need, the steps, what you should see and a safety card. A teacher-led demonstration gives the idea and its hazards; its method is for tutors on the learning platform.
Review
Reviewed before publication (owner’s confirmation, 24 September 2026). That covers every activity here, and a practical’s page lists the sources its author read.
A safety card on every page
The risk, who supervises and the hazards. The 38 teacher-led demonstrations show their idea and hazards here; their materials, steps and sources, and any result, control or note that states a number or an amount, are for tutors and administrators on the learning platform.
School laboratory, not for home
207 activities are medium or high risk. Each says so on its page: In a school laboratory, with a teacher supervising, under the school's risk assessment. Not for home.
Curriculum references
Each activity lists the NSW syllabus outcomes and Australian Curriculum v9 codes it supports. They are references, not a verified or complete curriculum alignment.
Find an activity
44 activities
Geography K–10
Bird's-eye view: from a model of the classroom to a pictorial map
A map shows places as they look from directly above, so objects keep their positions relative to each other when a room is drawn as a plan.
PracticalLow riskA term of weather and nature records beside a published Aboriginal seasonal calendar
Seasons can be read from plants, animals and weather in a place rather than from dates, and the Aboriginal calendar for a Country divides the year differently from the four-season calendar.
PracticalLow riskFeature walk: natural, managed and constructed features on a labelled map
Every feature of a local place can be sorted as natural, managed or constructed, and its position can be recorded on a map.
PracticalLow riskHow much water does our school use in a day
Water use can be measured in litres with a bucket and a timer, and a day's total for a place is the sum of many small uses.
Practical, model not builtLow riskMake a rain gauge and keep a monthly rainfall record
Rainfall is a depth of water spread over the ground, so a straight-sided container measures it in millimetres regardless of the container width.
Practical, model not builtLow riskWind vane, compass and a class wind rose
Wind has a direction that can be named by the compass point it comes from, and a month of daily readings shows which directions are most common at the school.
PracticalLow riskErosion trays: bare soil, mulched soil and turf under the same rain
Plant cover and mulch slow water and hold soil, so the same rainfall carries far less soil off a covered slope than off a bare one.
PracticalLow riskMeasure the playground and draw it to scale
A scale is a fixed ratio between map distance and ground distance, so measured ground lengths become map lengths by division.
Practical, model not builtLow riskStates, territories and neighbours on a real map, with scale-bar distances
Australia and its neighbours are located by direction and distance, and a printed scale bar turns a string length into kilometres.
Practical, model not builtLow riskWhere is Earth's water: dividing one litre by the real proportions
Almost all of Earth's water is sea water and most fresh water is ice or underground, so the water people draw from rivers and lakes is a tiny share.
Practical, model not builtLow riskCatchment model: where the rain goes
Rain that falls anywhere inside a catchment boundary drains to the same low point, carrying whatever is on the surface with it.
PracticalLow riskClimate graphs for two Australian stations from Bureau data
Two places at different latitudes have different patterns of monthly rainfall and temperature, and a climate graph makes the pattern comparable at a glance.
PracticalLow riskFire danger from the schoolyard: temperature, humidity and wind into the McArthur index
Fire danger is set by weather that can be measured, and it rises steeply with heat and wind and falls with humidity, which is why the same bush can be safe one afternoon and dangerous the next.
Practical, model not builtLow riskLatitude, longitude and the shortest route: string on a globe against a flat map
Latitude and longitude fix any place on the globe, and the shortest route between two places is a great circle, which a string pulled tight on a globe follows and a straight line on a flat map does not.
Practical, model not builtLow riskRead the bushfire prone land map around the school
Bush fire prone land is mapped by local councils and certified by the Commissioner of the NSW Rural Fire Service, so the hazard around a place can be read from an official map and measured with its scale.
PracticalLow riskSurface temperature survey of the schoolyard with an infrared thermometer
Surface cover chosen by people (asphalt, concrete, grass, shade trees) sets how hot a surface becomes in the sun, which is the mechanism behind urban heat.
PracticalLow riskAngle of repose: how steep a slope of loose material can stand
Loose material piles up to a fixed maximum angle that depends on the grains and their wetness, and a slope cut steeper than that angle fails.
PracticalMedium riskAquifer in a tank: porosity, permeability and a pumped well
Groundwater fills the pore space between grains; how much a layer holds is its porosity and how fast water moves through it is its permeability, and pumping a well lowers the water table around it.
Practical, model not builtLow riskContour lines from a model hill in a rising tank
A contour is the line where a level surface meets the land, so raising water in fixed steps around a model hill draws the contour map of that hill.
Practical, model not builtLow riskCreek discharge from a cross-section and float timing
Discharge is cross-sectional area multiplied by velocity, so a creek's flow in litres per second can be measured with a tape, a ruler and a floating orange.
Practical, model not builtMedium riskDune formation: wind over bare and planted sand
Wind moves dry sand grains and drops them where the wind slows, so any obstacle including plants starts a dune and holds it.
PracticalMedium riskHow much rain does the roof catch: from gauge depth to tank litres
Rainfall depth times catchment area gives a volume, so a school roof and a rain gauge reading predict the litres a tank receives from one storm.
Practical, model not builtLow riskLiveability transect: measuring environmental quality at five sites
Environmental quality can be measured, not only felt: noise, shade, litter, traffic and surface heat differ along a walk through a suburb and can be scored and mapped.
PracticalLow riskLocating an earthquake from P and S wave arrival times
P waves outrun S waves, so the gap between their arrivals at a station gives the distance to the earthquake, and three distances fix the epicentre.
Practical, model not builtLow riskLongshore drift in a wave tray, with and without a groyne
Waves that arrive at an angle carry sand along the beach in the direction they travel, and a wall built across the beach traps sand on the side the sand comes from and starves the other side.
Practical, model not builtLow riskReading a real topographic map: grid references, distance, area and gradient
A topographic map encodes position, distance, area and height in a fixed grid, scale and contour interval, so real landform sizes and slopes can be computed from it.
Practical, model not builtLow riskRing infiltrometer: how fast water soaks into three surfaces
Infiltration rate falls as the soil wets up and differs by surface, which decides how much rain becomes runoff instead of soil water.
Practical, model not builtLow riskStorm hydrograph from a stream table: bare catchment versus sponge wetland
A catchment turns a short burst of rain into a longer, lower outflow, and storage on the surface (vegetation, wetlands) lengthens the delay and lowers the peak, which is what reduces flooding downstream.
Practical, model not builtLow riskStream table: meanders, cut banks, point bars and a delta
Flowing water erodes where it moves fastest (outside of bends) and deposits where it slows (inside of bends and at the mouth), so a straight channel becomes a meandering one and builds a delta.
PracticalLow riskTectonic plates on a tennis ball and how far Australia moves
The rigid outer shell of the Earth is the lithosphere, the crust together with the strong uppermost mantle, and it is broken into plates that move over the weaker rock below; their edges are where earthquakes, volcanoes and mountain building happen, and their motion is slow but measurable.
Practical, model not builtLow riskWaterwatch water quality testing of a local waterway
The health of a waterway is measured by a fixed set of physical and chemical readings plus the animals living in it, compared against published guideline ranges.
PracticalMedium riskWeathering: freeze–thaw on wet sandstone and acid on chalk
Rock is broken down in place by physical stress (water expanding as it freezes) and by chemical reaction (acid dissolving calcium carbonate), and both can be measured as mass lost.
PracticalLow riskWhere our things come from: a label survey and a flow-line map
Everyday goods connect a household to producing places around the world, and counting labels and drawing flow lines with measured widths turns that connection into a map.
Practical, model not builtLow riskWho lives within walking distance: buffers around services on a scaled map
Access to a service depends on distance, and a circle of fixed ground radius drawn to the map scale shows which homes are within that straight-line distance of it, which is not the same as being within that walking distance.
Practical, model not builtLow riskBeach profile survey with two graduated poles and the horizon (Emery method)
A beach's shape changes with waves and storms, and repeated profiles along a fixed line measure where sand has been lost or gained and by how much.
Practical, model not builtMedium riskComputing the Human Development Index from its four indicators
Human development is measured by combining health, education and income indicators, each scaled between fixed goalposts and joined by a geometric mean, so a country cannot make up for a very low score in one dimension with a high score in another.
Calculation and dataLow riskHow fast is this beach moving: shoreline change from annual satellite shorelines
Annual shorelines mapped from satellite imagery since 1988 show whether a coast is eroding or growing, and a line fitted through the positions gives the rate in metres per year.
Practical, model not builtLow riskHow much wheat can the rain grow: the French and Schultz potential yield model
In a dryland wheat biome the growing-season rainfall sets a ceiling on grain yield, because a fixed amount of water is lost from the soil surface before the crop can turn water into grain.
Calculation and dataLow riskMapping advantage and disadvantage: a choropleth from ABS SEIFA scores
Wellbeing varies across places within Australia, and a choropleth map of an index shows the pattern, but the classes chosen for the map change what the pattern appears to be.
Practical, model not builtLow riskMeasuring urban growth with a grid over annual satellite composites
Urban growth can be measured, not just described, by counting grid cells of built-up land in satellite images of the same frame from two years.
PracticalLow riskPopulation pyramid from Census data and a growth model checked against the ABS
A population's age and sex structure is drawn from counts, and its growth rate compounds, so a small annual percentage doubles a population within decades.
Practical, model not builtLow riskSalinity and crops: a seedling trial checked against FAO salt-tolerance data
Salt in soil water reduces plant growth once it passes a threshold that differs by crop, which is why land clearing that raises saline groundwater cuts food production.
Practical, model not builtLow riskSoil texture by sedimentation: a jar test timed by Stokes' law
A soil's sand, silt and clay fractions settle out of water at very different speeds because settling speed rises with the square of grain size, and the fractions decide how a soil holds water and supports a biome's productivity.
Practical, model not builtLow riskWeed cover along a transect from a walking track into bushland
Disturbance at a track edge lets weeds invade bushland, and point-intercept quadrats along a transect measure how weed cover changes with distance from the disturbance.
PracticalMedium risk
For tutors and administrators
The materials and steps of every teacher-led demonstration are on the learning platform, with the safety card first. Sign in with a tutor or administrator account to read them.